Lessons from the flood

A FEW weeks ago, John and Kathy Mahon became the first
residents of flood-damaged Grantham in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley
to move to a historic new housing estate locals call ”The High
Country”. From a bit further up the hill, they can look down at
their former home, where – on January 10 last year – they said
their prayers and prepared to die.

The sturdy brick house was disappearing rapidly beneath a violent
brown tide of floodwater and debris. Only about 20 minutes earlier,
the metre-high flash flood described as an ”inland tsunami” roared
down the valley and tore apart the sleepy little hamlet where John
and Kathy met at a local dance, raised a family, and had recently
celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary.

With the couple on that day were two of their adult daughters and
two young grandsons, who had been visiting when the disaster
struck. With night approaching, and water inside the house already
chest-high, there seemed no way rescuers could reach them in time.

”So we all sorta said goodbye to ourselves,” says John Mahon, 56.
”Then we rang another daughter in
Brisbane and said goodbye to her. We told her they’d probably
find us in the kitchen, because we thought at that stage we were
going to drown. But after we said the Lord’s Prayer, the water
was still rising, so we decided we’d better go outside.”

The rest of the family scrambled onto the roof, but the avuncular
John Mahon – for decades the town’s butcher and ”a pretty heavy
fella” – couldn’t manage the final stage and was left clinging to a
gutter with his feet supported by a submerged table. Incredibly, he
hung on for 90 minutes and was the last of the family to be winched
to safety by an Emergency Management Queensland helicopter.

The chopper’s now celebrated crew (pilot Mark Kempton and crewmen
Mark Turner and Daren Parsons) rescued 28 people that afternoon,
amid lightning strikes and pelting rain, and deposited them safely
at a hillside farmhouse. It wasn’t until later that night, when
they regathered at a local evacuation centre, that survivors began
to learn of the drownings. Almost everyone in Grantham (population
400) lost someone they knew or loved, and the toll from flood
events over several days in the Lockyer Valley and the nearby city
of Toowoomba would reach 22.

By then, nature had already kicked the Christmas spirit out of many
other parts of Queensland, starting on December 25 when tropical
cyclone Tasha crossed the coast near Gordonvale, just south of
Cairns, dumping falls of up to 280 millimetres across the north. As
the deluge moved south through waterways and flood plains, rivers
burst, stock perished, and thousands of people fled their homes or
were evacuated from western Queensland, the Darling Downs,
Bundaberg, the Central Highlands and Rockhampton. (A moment of
relief came on January 7, when the RockhamptonMorning
Bulletin corrected its earlier report that 30,000 pigs
had floated down the Dawson River. ”What Baralaba piggery owner Sid
Everingham actually said,” amended the Bully, ”was 30 sows and
pigs.”)

Brisbane’s turn was yet to come, and it would be almost as horrible
as the worst pessimists anticipated. When the freaky summer ended
(climaxing with one of the largest cyclones ever to cross the
Australian coastline), 35 lives had been lost across Queensland,
and more than 500,000 square kilometres had been affected by flood.
In the aftermath, though, it was the awful sudden violence wreaked
upon tiny Grantham, where 11 residents died, that lodged most
unsettlingly in the national psyche.

After they got the insurance payout for their ruined home, John and
Kathy Mahon considered moving elsewhere. ”But straight away,” says
John, ”we thought, ‘Where? Where would we go?’ We’ve both lived
here all our lives. Before we got together, I worked at the butcher
shop, and Kathy worked at her father’s fruit shop across the road.
I used to stare at her all day, but she hated my guts. She only
went out with me in the hope I’d leave her alone, but that just
started me chasing her more! She reckons she still doesn’t know why
she married me.”

In a unique arrangement initiated by the Lockyer Valley Regional
Council, the Mahons ended up swapping their flooded block for one
at the new hillside estate. They’re renting the first house
constructed there, but within a year hope to move to their own
home, now being built further up the hill. Over time, they’ll be
joined on the estate by scores of other families taking part in the
land swap, part of a staged $ 40 million disaster recovery plan
devised by the council to prevent the still badly damaged town
being abandoned. On Tuesday, locals will hold memorials for flood
victims during a one-off public holiday granted by the state
government.

”A few weeks ago, when it was raining, we went down to check the
creek level,” reports Mahon. ”Like a lot of people here, we still
get jumpy and have flashback memories. It was only about half full,
but as I said to Kathy, ‘Gee, I’m glad we’re up there on the hill.
Now you can sleep in peace.’ ”

Jan Dalton was driving through Brisbane about six weeks ago
when she realised that thoughts of the floods, and their exhausting
aftermath, were no longer at the front of her mind.

”It was all I’d thought about for almost every waking moment of the
past 10 months,” says the former Sydneysider, who lost almost
everything she owned when her flat in the inner-city suburb of
Rosalie went under during the flood’s peak.

”There were times during the past year when I wondered, ‘When is
this [fixation] ever going to go away?’,” adds Dalton, an IT
director with Queensland Treasury. ”Then, just like that, it did.”

But deeper memories of what she calls her ”best and worst of years”
are unlikely to fade. Like the surreal scenes outside her flat in
Beck Street as residents rushed to carry out whatever they could
before their homes were inundated on the morning of Wednesday,
January 12: ”There was an old lady standing in the middle of the
street in her nightie just screaming and screaming. But no one
could get her to do anything.”

Or returning to the still-flooded scene two days later and
recognising ”bits of my life” (cards, letters, books etc) floating
about her in the street. Or the way groups of cheerful volunteers
suddenly materialised to do battle with the residue of stinking
mud, ruined furnishings and broken spirits, offering unlikely
treats – ”Have a cupcake!” – or reassuring hugs, until, like
thousands of other dazed victims across the city, Jan Dalton could
no longer tell whether she was crying over her losses or their
kindness.

”People say it was a Queensland thing,” says Dalton, who moved to
Brisbane from
Sydney’s North Shore 15 years ago. ”But I think the way
people rallied around was more an Australian thing than uniquely
Queensland. An English friend was amazed; she said it would never
have happened in her country.”

Dalton had no flood cover, and ended up paying almost $ 60,000 to
have her flat’s interior stripped and rebuilt before she returned
there in September. It wasn’t her first taste of Deep North
volatility: in November 2008 her previous home at
The Gap was damaged by an ”even scarier” violent storm. Only
six months after she repaired and sold that house and resettled
at Rosalie, the floods came.

But, like the Mahons at Grantham, Dalton has no plans to leave. ”I
like it here. The floods were a horrific experience, but the way it
brought the community together was really interesting … it
highlighted the things that are important in life.”

The raging torrents that sank Brisbane were a confluence of flood
runoff from central Queensland and torrential rain in the
south-east, bolstered by enforced – and still controversial -
releases from the already over-capacity Wivenhoe Dam, the vast
structure that was supposed to ”save” Brisbane from a repeat of the
catastrophic 1974 floods.

On Tuesday, January 11, this swelling inland sea caused both the
Brisbane River and the Bremer in Ipswich (30 kilometres to the
west) to break their banks. Built across a flood plain near the end
of its mighty river’s serpentine trek from the foothills of the
Great Dividing Range, Brisbane had no chance. Low-lying areas began
to flood on Tuesday morning; by lunchtime, workers were fleeing the
central business district, home owners were sandbagging
desperately, and vessels of all shapes and sizes dodged debris in a
wild race for the safety of Moreton Bay. (Scores of those that
remained are now on the river’s muddy bottom.)

By the end of Wednesday, about 22,000 homes and 7600 businesses in
94 suburbs were flood-affected. Suncorp Stadium became a
two-metre-deep swimming pool, the river ferry terminal
infrastructure was largely destroyed, and the CBDs of Brisbane and
Ipswich were semi-submerged. But even as worse loomed, with the
Brisbane River predicted to reach its destructive peak (a metre
higher than the record attained in 1974) during a high tide early
on Thursday morning, the city maintained a defiant air.

”We are Queenslanders … we’re the ones that they knock down, and we
get up again. Together we can pull through this,” declared Premier
Anna Bligh, blending pop songs and parochialism in a winning way
that bolstered (albeit briefly) her sagging political fortunes. As
it turned out, the dire expectations for Thursday proved wrong.
Thanks to two days without rain, the river’s peak of 4.46 metres
was more than a metre short of predictions. With a ”Mud Army” of
62,000 registered volunteers eager to help, the clean-up began in
earnest.

But arguments over who was ”to blame” for the flood disaster have
proved stickier than the mud. In early August, the Queensland
Floods Commission of Inquiry released an interim report containing
175 recommendations, including a call for water levels in the
Wivenhoe Dam to be reduced to 75 per cent of normal capacity should
the Bureau of Meteorology again issue the sort of strong warning of
an extreme wet season it made before last summer’s floods.

Other recommendations were for Seqwater to better train dam
engineers and overhaul the Wivenhoe Dam’s floods manual; the
establishing of a central point to co-ordinate air support for such
disasters, and a more uniform approach to the management of
evacuation centres. Water Utilities Minister Stephen Robertson took
a few hits over his handling of attempts to reduce water levels at
Wivenhoe before the floods, and Premier Bligh admitted there were
failures in the state’s level of preparation for floods, saying
that with hindsight she would have done some things differently.

The commission held further hearings later last year, and is due to
release its full report within a few months. By last November, the
Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal (now closed) had paid out more
than $ 276 million to more than 40,000 people affected by the floods
and cyclone Yasi. The massive category 5 cyclone was the climax of
the state’s worst wet season in living memory. It rampaged across
the coast between Innisfail and Cardwell in the early hours of
Thursday, February 3, with winds gusting to 290km/h, destroying
homes, devastating crops, and damaging coastal roads and
infrastructure.

Given the many variables, the real and continuing financial costs
attached to Queensland’s disastrous summer can only be guessed at.
But officially, according to Treasurer Andrew Fraser, the floods
and cyclone Yasi combined will set state coffers back by almost
$ 1.5 billion.

Source: Brisbane Times

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